Context for people unaware of this scam:
Arist is a long drawn out campaign of lies and fraud. These two brothers Beson and Nelson came up with a concept for a phone app which could remotely control an automatic coffee machine. They looked into government startup funding to kickstart their business and realised they needed to be manufacturing a physical device of some sort to receive the grant they wanted. So they simply said they were making a coffee machine, in fact they said they alread had made 1000 or more coffee machines by hand. For some reason nobody thought to verify this and they received money and office space from the government for their "business".
So then they figured they had to sort of try and actually make a coffee machine which they obviously never originally wanted or intended to do. They decided to crowdfund some more money using the same bullshit story they told the HK government, that they already had designed and hand made 1000's of coffee machines and just needed some extra capital to pay for tooling to go into mass production.
They then used friends and family as fake "seeders" to pledge money to the kickstarter campaign. This is presumably to give the appearance of it being a popular campaign and encourage other backers to also donate. They then refunded the family and friends pledges using money from the genuine backers. This is documented through leaked text messages posted on Aristscam
The campaign was successful and they raised almost $1 million. They also created a website and started to pre-sell the non-existant coffee machines.
The promised machines were ridiculously specced for the price. They would grind beans, have a compartment to store and chill milk, hot water, syrup and powder, all of these ingredients would then be automatically mixed in infinitely variable combinations using the phone app which would contain thousands of recipes created by professional baristas, all for $299. Because apparently their run of 1000 plus hand made units were already delivered to baristas for testing and refinement and to create recipes.
Fast forward about a year and nothing had happened. No coffee machine, not even a prototype or video could be shown. There were endless excuses and bizarre consipracy theories about the "competition" trying to ruin the campaign and steal their IP.
Shit started to hit the fan as evidence of their scamming came to light. The fact no prototype ever existed, no hand made pre-production units ever existed, fake patent numbers had been give out in backer updates, finally culminating in an interview the brothers did with Now TV which showed them using a giant off the shelf fish tank pump which they manually connected up to a battery with loose wires, pumped some cold water from a plastic bucket through a sieve of preground coffee. This was their achievement after a year and $1 million
At this point the kickstarter backers were going into full meltdown. Arist had promised refunds for over 6 months and still haven't delivered. Then somehow, somehow after all this blatant and public bullshit they secured $10 million in funding from a private investment company... which they promptly used to hire their friends, move into a large and flashy new office space and hire a private boat so they could all go on a holiday and drink champagne.
Now that they had serious investors that they couldn't lie to as easily as crowdfunding backers they decided it was time to actually try and design a coffee machine. They began work for what was obviously the very first time on the coffee machine and justified the reason they were designing something from scratch that supposedly already existed a year ago as "refinement".
Several months later they announced the unveiling of the machine everyone had been waiting for... except it was a completely different machine. Roughly 10 times the size of the original concept, 1/4 of the features and 5 times the price. Seriously this behemoth coffee machine can only grind beans, it can't even heat the water, and you have to add your own milk afterwards, all for $1500. Bargain.
At this time Arist are promising to send backers this shitty machine instead of the one from the campaign and sometime maybe in the future if they actually manage to build the originally promised machine (they won't) then backers can exchange it for no cost.
Now they supposedly have a deal with a coffee chain to sell commercial coffee machines to use in their stores. In what is turning out to be a ponzi scheme they have used backer money to pay back their "fake" original backers, then used private investment money to pay for the machines they promised the backers and now are using this coffee chain to pay back their investor.
As a final slap to the face of everyone foolish enough to give money to these scamming brothers, one of them has recently moved into a $5 million dollar mansion. That's right, the company which has never actually made or sold anything is seemingly able to fund quite lavish lifestyles for it's owners all paid for with other peoples money. Also a reporter who recently visited their office to write a story on Arist said that there was no work being done there and it was just 20 people playing around with toy cars and shit.
Article is here if you can be bothered translating it from chinese: http://nextplus.nextmedia.com/news/%E6%99%82%E4%BA%8B%E8%A6%81%E8%81%9E/20160325/376208
ここには何もないようです